The Gradual Absolvence of Animosity
by Insanely Me
Summary: Alex didn't know it, but Yassen had been there on the night of his birth.


**AN: I sat down to write something else, but this idea wanted out instead. Enjoy! **

**DISCLAIMER: I am in no way affiliated with Alex Rider and/or Anthony Horowitz. **

Alex doesn't know it, but Yassen was there the night Alex was born. Hell, he wasn't even sure if John had known he was there, hidden in plain sight in the uniform of green rubber.

But he had been.

He'd handed the birthing doctor his implements when the ordeal had begun, and when the pain of a natural birth became too much for Helen (for Hunter's _wife_), he'd held her hand. He held the hand of the wife of the man he loved and he seethed. He seethed in anger and in self-hate and he wished so hard that there would be a complication, that she would die, that he could have Hunter as his partner and as his lover and as his _everything_.

But though his hand itched to remove itself, he couldn't bring himself to do it. Maybe it was her pain, or maybe it was the idea that her hand had held his partner's more than his ever would, but he held on through the worst of the contractions and right on up until the child was birthed.

He hated it immediately.

He hated how it screamed. He hated the smallness of its body. He hated how Hunter was reduced to a domesticated _John _by the sight of it_. _He hated how gentle he was with the infant, carefully cradling its body in a way that he would never touch Yassen, as he snipped the umbilical cord.

He hated how much he envied the child.

And he had meant to slip away, honestly, he had. To leave the room before he could be found out. But the head doctor had placed the infant into his arms and had commanded him take to take the child to the nursery to be cleaned.

There had been no way to refuse the order without causing immediate repercussions (and he had always been taught to never say no to a direct command such as that). He had awkwardly carried the child off towards what he assumed was the cleaning area, but planned immediately to leave the no longer screaming child with a hospital employee as soon as he reached his destination. However, that was not to be. The area was empty, and, having no other option except for leaving the child alone and covered in birthing fluids (and as much as he hated the child and the coupling which had produced it, he couldn't bring himself to abandon the newborn), he commenced to bathing the child.

He was just as awkward with the bathing as he had been with the transportation.

He, he had admitted to himself, was frightened of breaking it. He, Yassen Gregorvitch, one of SCORPIA's up-and-coming prodigy, one who had faced torture and heartbreak and the harsh streets of Russia, was frightened of a child.

He cleaned it slowly and softly, as he liked to imagine his mother had when he had been a boy. He washed away all of the remains of the womb from the infant (from _Alex_), and as the child gooed and squinted up at him, he felt a wave of what seemed to him to be sentimentality.

Rather intrigued by this new turn of events, he had placed Alex down onto the changing table to dry him off and to put on his nappie.

And if Yassen had felt awkward washing the child, he was sure that he must have produced quite a sight trying to arrange the cloth appropriately around Alex's bottom. He felt, however, at the conclusion of his struggle, that he had done a well good job (a British phrase he had picked up from Hunter).

By this time (Yassen noticed belatedly, and with considerable surprise), the nursery had filled considerably, several nurses and two other newborns now occupying what had been free space. Realizing that his window for departure was quickly disintegrating, he quickly handed off the baby to a much more qualified nurse, and hurried out of the hospital and down into the parking garage, where he slipped into the non-descript tan car he had rented for this excursion and headed back towards the airport.

And if it was there, in a rented car, stuck in Chelsea traffic, that Yassen Gregorvich vowed to never let any harm come to the child, to _Alex_, for as long as he should live, well then. No one else needed to know.

**Utter crap. **


End file.
